Setting a delegate using blocks in iPhone - iphone

Question

On a view controller I have multiple textfields, which all use the same delegate. Now in the delegate the code gets really ugly since I have to differentiate between all the textfields (bunch of if/else-if or a switch statement). I came a cross this article:
Blocks in textfield delegates
But from this I still don't understand how this solves the problem? Doesn't this basically call one method and pass it the text and the method has no idea what textfield gave the string? You would still need to differentiate between the textfields, but this time inside the block (with the usual if(textfield == bazTextField)...).

Answer 1

I don't know that it exactly solves the problem so much as shifts it (and into viewDidLoad, which usually gets a bit of mush-mash in it anyway).
However in that example the block itself was being passed in the textfield to run comparisons with and "remembers" the values of all the instance variables as well (if it refers to them), so that's how it knows what text and text field is being dealt with.
I don't see how that code exactly is supposed to help though, since it assigns one block to the single delegate class to be used with all text field delegates - unless perhaps you were supposed to have one per text field, each with a different block. Then you have way more code than you'd have had with the if statements!

Answer 2

The article doesn't make it clear, but I believe the idea is to create one of these blocks (and block delegate objects) for each UITextField that you wish to have respond to textFieldShouldReturn.

Answer 3

hm, maybe I didn't completely understand the article, but I don't see the advantage of using blocks instead of selectors in that concrete example.
you could achieve something similar like this
#interface AlternativeTextFieldDelegate : NSObject <UITextFieldDelegate>
{
SEL selectorToCall;
id objectToCall;
}
- (void) setObjectToCall:(id)obj selector:(SEL)selector;
#end
#implementation AlternativeTextFieldDelegate
- (void) setObjectToCall:(id)obj selector:(SEL)selector
{
objectToCall = obj;
selectorToCall = selector;
}
- (BOOL)textFieldShouldReturn:(UITextField *)textField
{
[objectToCall performSelector:selectorToCall];
return YES;
}
#end
and the view controller
#interface ViewWithTextFieldsController : UIViewController
{
UITextField *tf1;
AlternativeTextFieldDelegate *delegateForTF1;
UITextField *tf2;
AlternativeTextFieldDelegate *delegateForTF2;
}
// ...IBOutlets and all that...
- (void) tf1ShouldReturn; // handles shouldReturn for tf1
- (void) tf2ShouldReturn; // handles shouldReturn for tf2
#end
#implementation ViewWithTextFieldsController
- (void) viewDidLoad // or wherever
{
delegateForTF1 = [[AlternativeTextFieldDelegate alloc] init];
[delegateForTF1 setObjectToCall:self selector:#selector(tf1ShouldReturn)];
tf1.delegate = delegateForTF1;
delegateForTF2 = [[AlternativeTextFieldDelegate alloc] init];
[delegateForTF2 setObjectToCall:self selector:#selector(tf2ShouldReturn)];
tf2.delegate = delegateForTF2;
}
// ...
#end
don't really know if that's any better than chaining if-elses though.
it seems to me that this complicates things more than the problem it solves.